John Waters, whose early films and later sculpture are so indebted to Manson, finds evidence of the creative impulse well in advance of the murders: “Was Manson’s . . . ‘creepy crawling,’ some kind of humorous terrorism that might have been fun? Breaking silently into the homes of middle-class ‘pigs’ with your friends while you are tripping on LSD and gathering around the sleeping residents in their beds, not to harm them but to watch them sleep. . . . It does sound like it could have been a mind-bending adventure. When the Mansonites went further and moved the furniture around before they left, just to fuck with the waking homeowners’ perception of reality, was this beautiful or evil? Could the Manson Family’s actions also be some kind of freakish ‘art’?”4
No artist has engaged in a more sustained or complex relationship with Manson and the Family than the Baltimore filmmaker, sculptor, photographer, and agent provocateur. In this respect he is Raymond Pettibon’s art-world doppelganger, though Waters has been much more upfront and articulate about his obsession: from the filming of Multiple Maniacs during the breaking-news days of 1969 through his twenty-first-century advocacy for the parole of his friend Leslie Van Houten, Waters has never left the Manson Family alone for very long. But rather than try to “beat” the performance killings directed by Manson, Waters has more regularly attempted to “join” them. In Shock Value, Waters explains that he began work on Multiple Maniacs before the “real killers” had been apprehended. As a result, he decided that “Divine would take credit for the murders in the film. I figured that if the murderers were never caught, there would always be the possibility that Divine really did do it.”5 As the filming progressed, and the members of the Family were arrested, Waters changed his plot, even as the mission remained the same: “We wanted to scare the world . . . but we used a movie camera instead of deadly weapons.” According to his own account, Waters did not only “scare the world,” but also sent a cast member around the bend. As the director explains, “one of our new actors flipped out in the middle of a scene and ran from the set, screaming: ‘I know that’s a police camera. You’ve tricked me into confessing to the Tate murders, and now I’ll be arrested!”6 Manson and members of his Family were, of course, arrested during the late fall of 1969 and Waters’s actors—if not his plot—were safe. The ending to Multiple Maniacs was changed; as Waters puts it, nobody, “not even Divine, could upstage Charles Manson.”7
The organizing principle of this book you are reading is meant to emphasize that the artistic expressions inspired by Manson, his Family, and their crimes, have often been compelled to engage with the Family’s own dramatic bent. The creepy crawl was nothing if not theatrical. The rearranging of furniture and consciousness was devised as a sort of real-world guerrilla stage direction: “Square family members wake up from their nighttime stupor as Family members exit through doors and windows. They look around. On their faces we see that they are questioning everything they have believed in until this point.” In his book on the Doors, Greil Marcus refers to the Manson Family as a “band,” but a “troupe” is more like it. John Waters recognized how much his own company, the Dreamlanders, resembled the Manson Family, and he has spent decades unpacking the implications of this realization. “The Manson Family looked just like my friends at the time!” Waters has written. Recall how Charles “Tex” Watson reminded Waters of “the frat-boy-gone-bad pot dealer” who sold him his first joint in Catholic high school, and for whom he “had the hots.”8
In two different memoirs, on film, and in his sculpture, Waters goes to great pains to draw connections between the theatricality of the real-world Manson Family and the guerrilla attack of his own early films. Years after evoking the Family in Multiple Maniacs (1970) and Female Trouble (1974) Waters apologized for his own use of “the Manson murders in a jokey, smart-ass way . . . without the slightest feeling for the victims’ families or the lives of the brainwashed Manson killer kids who were also victims in this sad and terrible case.”9
Whatever latter-day concerns Waters has expressed about his exploitation of the Manson moment, he remains perhaps our best interpreter of the Family’s relentless theatricality. Except for their leader (who may or may not have responded to the name “Jesus Christ”), members of the Family lived in the world with what Waters rightly calls “stage” names; Charles Watson is a distinct person, Waters suggests, from the Family actor Tex Watson. Waters describes Watson as if the young Texan had been a wannabe star hanging out in Schwab’s drugstore. Watson was, as Waters argues, “perhaps Manson’s best piece of work; a high-school football star who turned hippy and came to L.A. like millions of other kids to find ’60s grooviness. Instead he met Manson and was turned into a killer in just ten LSD, Belladona-drenched months.”10 Waters first really got to “know” the Family in the moment of the trial, and he was taken by their seemingly self-conscious efforts to create the media impact they desired. Waters has written that these “starlets were out to grab headlines and no press agent was necessary.” According to Waters, one of the accused referred to the trial as “this play”; these young women—playing “girls”—seemed to understand that they were still being directed to “do something witchy.” Some organized themselves into a sort of tourist attraction on Broadway and Temple, near the courthouse, spending their time “giggling and mugging for their fans as they sang Charlie’s songs.”11 The women of the Family were, as Waters puts it, “the most style-conscious defendants I’ve ever seen” and their head-shaving strikes him as an early development of a punk aesthetic.12 And all of this served, of course, as a supporting act for the main attraction; as Waters describes things, Manson always entered the scene last, as “a true star should.”13
While Waters’s use of the Manson crimes could certainly be criticized for being insensitive, it seems clear that his own evolving sense of responsibility (his concern for the Tate family, his serious engagement with Leslie Van Houten’s rehabilitation, and so on) was rooted in an unusual willingness to engage with Manson and his Family as actual people and not as one-dimensional signs of terror. Waters’s close friendship with Leslie Van Houten and his committed activism on her behalf, is one obvious fruit of his nonconforming approach to reintroducing Manson and his followers to his fans.
Waters’s 2006 sculpture “Playdate” is every bit as audacious (and touching) as his public declarations of support for the convicted murderer Van Houten. The tableau is simple enough—baby Michael Jackson meets baby Manson—and consonant with Waters’s carefully cultivated image as the Pope of Trash. With their tiny bodies clad in onesies, the toddlers are adorable. With carved forehead (Manson) and carved face (Jackson) they are unsettling. Waters insists on what he calls the “original innocence” of Manson and Michael Jackson: “Even Charles Manson had other goals as a toddler,” Waters wrote in 1986.14 This meeting of the toddlers (portrayed with their adult heads) enacts a simple plea on the part of the artist that his viewers practice emotional justice. Waters excuses Manson for none of the crimes he was convicted of, excuses Jackson for none of the crimes he was accused of, but he does demand that we imagine both (at least in part) as innocent children—innocent children who experienced terrifying levels of abuse and neglect. Waters’s achievement is to reintroduce these icons as objects of repressed feelings—affection, concern, and so on. There is nothing creepy about the crawl enacted here. The sculpture acts as a renunciation of the dehumanizing rhetorics surrounding the vilified figures. Waters is also too much of a popular culture historian to overlook the fact that Jackson and his family arrived in Los Angeles—ready for the big-time—in the summer of 1969, just as Manson’s Family was spiraling out of control. The Jackson 5’s first single was released on October 6, 1969, less than a week before Manson was arrested at Barker Ranch.
Perhaps the richest Manson art on the contemporary scene will be that which, like Waters’s “Playdate,” refuses to endow Manson with some kind of mystical or singular power. This does not require turning Manson back into a baby or taking an exculpato
ry stance toward the convicted culture leader. Audiences in 1972, for instance, did not seem to have much patience for a theatrical “rockumentary” titled 22 Years. It seems likely that no one was ready yet to hear this work’s argument about how Manson’s bad behavior was rooted in his own (titular) years of incarceration.15 But in more recent days a few visual artists have striven to reframe Manson as something other than a terrifying sex-mad guru and his Family as something other than sexy robots. Cady Noland’s work has been particularly important here. The installation artist’s work Mr. SIR presents an enigmatic portrait of Manson. The title alone evokes a sense of ambiguity with respect to Manson’s power. The defendant is on his way to court with his pad and two pencils (one of which he would use to attack Judge Older), but it is not at all clear whether the artist is addressing Manson as “Mr. SIR” or evoking Manson’s own rhetorical stance of Southern-born, jail-bred humility. The way Manson hides behind his mass of hair suggests deference; his allegedly hypnotic stare is neutered here. But the pose also suggests slyness. Manson is keeping his own counsel here, to be sure. Manson is also wearing the Family vest in Noland’s portrait—the visual chronicle his followers spent so many hours constructing for him. While his left hand holds the two pencils (which look like drumsticks from a distance—perhaps another trophy taken from Dennis Wilson’s house?) Manson’s right hand is another story. With his thumb and pinky hidden, Manson’s right hand looks like a claw—it is not certain how functional this hand would be (and of course by Manson’s own testimony he never “growed up to . . . write too good”). The placement of “Mr. SIR” in the gallery also makes it difficult to know how to read the one other major visual element in the piece—the door. Is it simply a sign of the jail gates Manson will soon be locked behind? Or is it a reminder that he has already entered our homes and rearranged our furniture?
Noland has also created two major works about the Family that do not feature Manson at all. In Manson Girls Sit-In she presents a resolutely unthreatening image of Ouisch and Squeaky (and the top third or so of another Family member’s head), protesting the persecution outside the Hall of Justice in Los Angeles. But for all the familiar and potential witchiness of Squeaky and Ouisch, the tab-in-slot architecture of the work, which is then placed on the checkerboard gallery floor, re-presents the young women as the picture on a board-game piece (or pawns in a chess match). The piece, off center and somewhat lost in the spacious gallery, cannot play by the rules. The title encourages us to position the Manson women in a broader landscape of political action of the 1960s.
Even more striking is another Manson-themed work Noland debuted in 1993–1994. Not Yet Titled (Bald Manson Girls Sit-In Demonstration) confronts viewers with the uncomfortable reality of how quickly the Manson Family became a tourist attraction. As with so many objects of the tourist gaze, the Manson girls are being enclosed, defined, tamed. With wire-service news copy presented above the image, the bald women are offered up as a freaky spectacle, but Noland urges us to look into their eyes. While the artist wants to remind us of how quickly members of the Family were turned into objects of fantasy projection and dark humor, their relentless staring challenges the voyeuristic pleasure viewers might otherwise take in the tableau.
Taken together, Noland’s two “Manson Girls” pieces refuse ready-made interpretive frameworks (such as Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter) in favor of a more nuanced approach to gender, power, and spectacle. Decades earlier Ed Sanders warned Free Press readers to relinquish their fantasies about the sexual radicalism and availability of the young women living at Spahn Ranch. Here these women are monks, they are witches, they are news. They are nobody’s easy target or punch line.16
Photographer Joachim Koester puts a punctuation mark on various trajectories of Manson art by removing targets (i.e., people) altogether from his work. Koester’s 2008 Barker Ranch series uses the Family’s last hideout, a remote outpost near Death Valley, as it central concern. While not steeped in movie history as Spahn Ranch was, Koester encourages viewers to read Barker Ranch as also “rich in filmic allusions.”17 Koester’s ranch is devoid of almost all life. The key “figure” in number 4 of the series is a dead tree, a mockery of the Tree of Life at the heart of so many folkloric and mythological traditions. The Danish artist has come to Barker neither to praise nor to bury. His mission is to capture this iconic landscape, teetering at the moment just before it transforms into ruins. In taking us “back to the ranch” in this manner Koester insists that we understand the Manson case as a cracked Western. His Barker Ranch photography, then, must be understood as a late entry into the tradition of revisionist Western popular arts that began its rise to prominence just as Manson was making himself known to the musicians and filmmakers of Los Angeles.
Koester’s desolate landscape photography is not in any way meant to “represent” Manson and his Family so much as he wants to employ them and the case to repudiate the romanticizing of outlaw imagery in so much film and popular and music of the Vietnam-era and beyond. Perhaps most notable here is the cover of the first Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young LP, Déjà Vu, from 1970. Historian Michael Langkjaer has written incisively of how “the cover motif with its costumed and heavily armed ‘outlaws’ is a response to an America rent by social tensions contiguous with the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, fears of revolutionary violence and of notorious murders committed by the Charles Manson ‘family,’ for example, while also suggesting an ironic sense of failure of the youth counterculture.” The Eagles would present something similar a few years later on the cover of their third album, Desperado (1973). Aside from the silly gunslinger/guitarslinger analogy both bands are activating, the imagery here (especially in the CSN&Y cover, with its invocation of the Confederate “Lost Cause” in the person of Stephen Stills) is not only nostalgic, but rearguard.18 Joe Walsh joined the Eagles in 1975 after leading the James Gang, who also (obviously) trucked with Confederate/Western imagery. Warren Zevon would join this loose movement with his own “Frank and Jesse James,” which takes the fairly standard position that these ex-Confederates were Robin Hoods.
Koester’s work, on the other hand, joins a more insurgent tradition—or set of overlapping traditions, to be more precise. Perhaps thinking of what Pauline Kael called the “acid western” in her review of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970), along with the more widely known “Spaghetti Westerns” of Sergio Leone and others, and the so-called “Outlaw” country music coming from Austin and elsewhere in the 1970s, Koester refuses the comforts of projecting images of good and bad guys. Instead he offers only a broken promised land, a place where abstract concepts like “justice” and “mercy” could not possibly find any purchase.19 In the second photograph of the series, Koester shows an out-building at Barker Ranch, its exposed beams summoning up the bars of the jail cell that would become Manson’s next (and most familiar) home. With this, the Anglo-American ideal of Western freedom is laid as bare as these beams—“light out for the territory ahead of the rest” like Huck Finn if you will, but Koester’s picture reminds us that the forces that want to “sivilize” (and discipline) always know where you are.
This pragmatic doominess puts Joachim Koester in an artistic tradition that includes the filmwork of Sam Peckinpah and Dennis Hopper (whose fringe jacket and hat in Easy Rider marked him as both cowboy and Indian), the Firesign Theater (with its “electric western” version of Siddhartha in Zacariah), Alexander Jodorowsky, Monte Hellman, Arthur Penn, Jim McBride, Rudy Wurlitzer, and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995). It is there in the mournfulness of Townes Van Zandt’s oft-covered ballad “Pancho and Lefty” and in the woefully underappreciated work of folk singer Mary McCaslin. Over the course of a few solo records and one collaboration with Jim Ringer, McCaslin sang as a Westerner at once deeply steeped in the available mythologies of liberation but with a bracing realism about hierarchies of gender and corporate power shaping the contemporary landscape.
There are no jokes in Koester’s show. Koester’s California i
s the landscape of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point—but without the fantasy scene that portrays the hippie orgy in Death Valley. Manson did not “end” the sixties, Koester’s photographs suggest, but he did help close some frontiers. (Those frontiers are mournfully indexed in the first story in Claire Vaye Watkins 2013 collection Battleborn; in “Ghosts, Cowboys” Watkins—the daughter of Manson Family member Paul Watkins—runs through a history of the West that includes the doomed founding of Spahn Ranch in the 1940s.) Koester’s Barker Ranch series is Manson art in the extreme aftermath. This is not the breathtaking horror of the river of blood and bodies hanging from rafters that open El Topo, but the desert after vengeance has been wreaked. The post-Manson landscape is a terrain grown “weary of her inhabitants” (as John Winthrop wrote of England, in 1631, justifying the Anglo settling of New England), a barren place, with no families, and no Family.
Epilogue
Manson on Ice
Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969.” There is that pesky Joan Didion quotation again, serving as the opening title card to the 2019 film Charlie Says. The film is a serious feminist project and a shock, on many levels—not least because one of its major sources is Karlene Faith’s book The Long Prison Journey of Leslie Van Houten. I had corresponded with Faith in 2014, while I was diving into the research for this book, and at that point she made it clear that she had no interest in selling her work: she explained that she was regularly contacted by “people (usually men, often lawyers) who want to make contact with [Leslie Van Houten], or who want my/her help with a planned film, theatre piece etc.” Her email continued, “I reply briefly… and turn down all requests.”
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